Every now and then I run into a book that answers exactly the questions I’ve been wanting to ask. In this case I’ve long been interested in the Isma’ilis and their brand of Shi’a Islam, being particularly attracted to their philosophical expansiveness. But while I knew that the Isma’ilis made use of Neoplatonist thought that goes back to Plotinus, I wondered how exactly Neoplatonism melded with Isma’ili thought.. and what accounted for the differences in tone. Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani by Paul E. Walker is a book that, although narrowly focused, addresses exactly the connection between Neoplatonic philosophy and Isma’ili theology.
Al-Sijistani (d. 10th century A.D.) is not a household name. He doesn’t have the fancy Latinized name of an Avicenna or Averroes. He was a partisan theologian for the official da’wa (institutional mission) of the Isma’ilis. Some of his philosophical/theological works were thankfully passed down by Isma’ili communities and have been gaining scholarly attention. Al-Sijistani happened to make wide and creative use of terms and concepts that are clearly derived from Neoplatonism.
What are we to make of this? Was al-Sijistani an Isma’ili philosopher or a philosophic Isma’ili? The latter it turns out. In one citation from al-Sijistani we read that the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun
squandered the public treasury of the Muslims in translating the books of atheistic, Greek, materialist philosophers, an act which resulted in the denial of Muhammad’s prophethood and of the resurrection after death. [33]
We can say from the start that al-Sijistani was not a friend of philosophy, but a theologian who found something useful in some of the philosophy that came from the Greeks. Walker makes the point that Isma’ili theologians could shift quite a bit in their philosophical framework, al-Sijistani making use of works eventually going back to Plotinus, but an Isma’ili successor, al-Kirmani, melding the same theological position to the Aristotelian philosophy of al-Farabi (153). There was nothing necessary about the exact philosophic system; they were interchangeable.
Why bother with philosophy if it wasn’t necessary? The answer must be the legitimacy that accrues from clothing doctrines in the language of philosophy. Walker briefly mentions “primitive” Isma’ili doctrines, such as God’s creation of the angelic figures kuni and qadar (30, 46). This material can be traced back to gnostic doctrines of creation. As Neoplatonism is added, these angelic beings are converted into the emanations from the One, Intellect (‘aql) and Soul (nafs). This represents a translation from a rough language to a more respectable one, or from language tied to suspect sources to language associated with widely respected ones. The problem was that there was no direct fit between the primitive doctrinal positions and the system of Neoplatonism, and this ill fit leads al-Sijistani into some acrobatic conceptual transformations.. and the genius of this book is in its ability to clearly set out these transformations.
One point I admire about Plotinus is his thorough mysticism. In the biography of Plotinus we learn that he personally experienced union with God. But the Isma’ilis—as I read about the Fatimids in medieval Egypt—never strike me as very mystical. What I had not understood is that personal mysticism gives way to institutional mysticism. Here is Walker:
The object of this desire [of Plotinus] is the One and the meeting between individual and soul. It is ecstatic and not rational, giving way thereby ultimately to mysticism. What makes al-Sijistani different is just this: his path to the One is not so much personal as institutional. It is, in his terms, a matter built into the ecclesiastical order… [74]
The mystical ascent is not undertaken by an individual, but rather is something undertaken by the institution. Insofar as one is connected to the Isma’ili da’wa, and its hierarchical order, one is ascending toward perfection. The institution as a whole is mystically connected to God, the imam at the top being the supreme expression of this ascent. The perfect Isma’ili is an institutional person.
That takes the fun out of Neoplatonism. It makes me reflect on my greater affinity for Sufi philosophies that find a place for individual experience. The spiritual experience of the Isma’ili, in Walker’s description, appears quite cool.. and rational:
If, as stated above, al-Sijistani allows no method for knowing the God he perceives to be utterly beyond reason and intelligibility, it would be expected that he offers no encouragement to mystics because he rejects any claim that the individual can attain special access to the ultimate reality. [80]
It’s clear I can no longer imagine the Fatimids with their scholars and da’is as a band of Plotinian mystics.. more like good corporate citizens.. with a high opinion of their institution and its CEO.
detail from map of Cairo, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572)
For me one of the mysteries about Cairo was the presence of a large bridge that begins from an area on the western bank of the Nile (across from the island of Rawda) and proceeded several miles to the foot of the pyramids. These bridges were under construction at the time of Ibn Jubayr’s visit in 1183 A.D. He writes the following:
This causeway is like a mountain stretched along the ground, over which it runs for a distance of six miles until it reaches the aforesaid bridges. These have about forty arches of the biggest type used in bridges, and reach the desert which extends from them to Alexandria. It is one of the most excellent measures taken by a prudent king in readiness against any sidden onslaught by an enemy coming through the breach of Alexandria at the time of the Nile’s overflow, when the countryside is in flood and the passage of soldiers thereby prevented. [45]
the “prudent king” is Salah al-Din, who did indeed have to worry about Crusader forays. It might look strange in the image above to see a truly massive project—bridges—running across dry land. But the point to remember is that during the inundation of the Nile this whole area would be covered with water. Thus the need for a bridge.
It might also seems strange for anyone who knows modern Cairo to see all this empty space. The entire area through which this causeway and bridge runs is now covered with building. In fact it is difficult to imagine that once he pyramids could be seen clearly from the pastoral setting of the island of Rawda:
from Description de l'Egypte
No way one could see the pyramids from there now. No way one could find a grassy spot like this on the island of Rawda! I’ve wondered where this bridge went, but I see from the account in The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian View (2006) that “all traces” of the bridge were erased by the end of the 19th century. At least part of the reason was the desire to construct an elevated roadway for getting visitors to the pyramids (2:133). I wonder if there is any place where these stones were re-used. I’d love to see remnants of this structure.
On a little closer inspection of the Description de l’Egypte I found an image of the bridge itself:
from Description de l'Egypte
At least part of it was still standing in 1800. It would be wrong to underestimate what a massive project this was. One of many elements of the city that are simply gone and need to be imagined if one is to have any hope of getting medieval Cairo.
scene from the Book of the Dead
Much of the Book of the Dead consists of spells or gives passwords for the afterlife, but a number of hymns are also included. These hymns carry some of the explicitly theological content of the Book of the Dead. In the above scene, which in the Papyrus of Ani (see here) is the penultimate one, the deceased and his wife come before Sokar-Osiris. The hieroglyphs around the scene are a hymn to Osiris, whose elements I will now comment upon:
O my Lord who passes eternity repeatedly, he who shall endure everlastingly, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Sovereign and Horus of Horuses.
This opening makes reference to Osiris as a god above time. I don’t know how that could be stated more clearly. This appears to contradict Erik Hornung’s view that “…in Egypt one cannot speak of a true transcendence that would raise a deity above space, time, and fate and extend his being into the realms of the absolute and limitless (Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, 191). But what else can it mean to “pass eternity repeatedly” and to “endure everlastingly”? It would seem that in the New Kingdom, at least, we have some notion of transcendence. His supreme rule is also emphasized in a formulation that recalls biblical attempts to denominate God as the ultimate ruler (“King of Kings, Lord of Lords”).
The hymn continues:
Those who have ever existed, behold, they are in your presence, namely those gods and men, you having made their seats preeminent in the God’s Domain, so that, assembled together, they might make supplication to your Ka, those who come in millions and millions, reaching and mooring with you.
This is a fantastically long sentence from the translator, and presumably it reflects the run-on quality of the hieroglyphs, never quite hitting on a full stop. The scene we should have in our mind is of a great gathering of the dead. Although the images from the Book of the Dead are resolutely individual (with addition of wife), the dead here are reckoned as a great host assembled before Osiris. All beings, including non-transcendent gods, are part of this host. It can be said that Osiris has “made their seat preeminent” because presumably they have passed through the judgment and not been cast into non-existence.
The number of this great host is said to reach “millions and millions.” This is the point I find most fascinating in the hymn: the assumed universalism of the afterlife. It calls to mind another New Kingdom version of the afterlife, the Book of Caverns. In hour 5 of that text the four races of humanity (Egyptians, Nubians, Asiatics, Libyans) are all present in the afterlife and under the protection of the gods. There is nothing in the text of this hymn that would lead us to view this host in the afterlife as somehow limited to Egyptians.
And they who are in the womb, they too have their faces toward you, for a tarrying (forever) in the Beloved Land shall never happen.
For the reader of the Bible it is hard not to think of Psalm 139 and this praise to God: “My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” This kind of devotional expression was not foreign to the Egyptians of the New Kingdom (an age of personal piety).
The infants in the womb turn their faces toward God (an expression of dependence it seems to me) “for” (i.e. here comes the reason) there is no way to live forever in the Beloved Land (Egypt). This serves to narrow the concern of the hymn. We are no longer among the great host of human beings, but brought back to the hopes of an Egyptian. Life in Egypt is beautiful but it won’t last.. and so attention from the beginning needs to be directed toward the God of death.
Cause that they all come to you, the great as well as the small.
Universal salvation is again hinted at here. This is a sentiment in the mouth of the deceased, and not a part of the description of the host of dead. The deceased isn’t hoping for any exclusions in death, but bluntly offers the hope that all will come to God. That is a sentiment not frequently voiced in the monotheistic traditions that we know. (As a Unitarian Universalist I feel free to embrace this hope.)
May he allow a going forth and a reentry from the God’s Domain without hindrance at the gateway of the Duat.
This is a central purpose of the Book of the Dead, whose title for the Egyptians was not “Book of the Dead,” but “Book of Going Forth by Day.” Through proper burial and use of spells the deceased would be freed to return to the land of the living from the underworld (Duat). So we can see this final line as the first real recognition of the importance of correct ritual burial.. for which the Book of the Dead had become a part during the New Kingdom.
The lecture series entitled “The Great Courses,” offered by the Teaching Company, should offer encouragement to the humanities professor. The offerings include lectures that will cross into the territory of many introductory classes at any college. Titles include “Classics of American Literature,” “A History of European Art,” and “Introduction to the Study of Religion.” People aren’t buying these courses to check off graduation requirements, they are doing so out of regard for their own personal enrichment.
On the cover of a recent mailer that came to my home I see “in your car, on your laptop, in your home.”A blog post I found is even more explicit about the setting for listening to them:
When do I have time to listen to these lectures? Well, on the top of my head, here are a few situations in which I normally put in my earphones and broaden my universe a little bit.
1. When I am riding my bike to work
2. When I am doing the dishes
3. When I am vacuum cleaning
4. When I am out jogging
5. When I am walking the dog
So the setting for these lectures, by design and in actual practice, is the leisure of an individual. And hey, it’s cool that enough people want to learn about dark matter, Augustine, and the Vikings to make this business profitable.
The success of this company (whose ads I see in the New Yorker and other magazines) tells us something about the challenges in front of the humanities. It’s not that we teach subjects that aren’t popular. Lots of people would pay money to learn something about our subjects. It’s fun to learn about ancient Egypt or the Second World War. The problem is that these subjects don’t have a great reputation for paying back the people who engage in their study. The challenge in attracting majors is not to get students interested, but to convince them that there’s a future for them out there if they choose this major.
It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the college experience becomes more focused on the kinds of skill-building classes that will prepare students for a job, while the humanities become wrapped up in general education requirements. In other words, the humanities become the place where a level of cultural literacy and proficiency in writing is attained, but not a viable separate field of study.
Here’s the thing: maybe this shouldn’t be avoided at all. What we need to wrap our heads around as academics is the notion that the pursuit of the humanities is something that over the next century will not be dominated by the academy. We should struggle against our tendency to classify students as grad-school or regular-job bound, and instead cultivate everyone as potential contributors to our field. Wikipedia is an early example of the way a store of knowledge at our fingertips is being created by amateurs. Who’s to say that as journals and databases become widely available online (not to mention tools for learning languages), amateurs won’t start to make contributions in many academic fields. This becomes easier to imagine if we predicate a continued weak economy over the next decade, crippling the expansion of many humanities departments.
This would change the orientation of education. The goal for the humanities should be to equip every student to be a lifelong contributor to a field of study. That would mean facts and theories, as well as the skills that would allow them to contribute in the future as they get the jobs they will need to pay the bills. These skills would include the skills that would allow them to contribute to the Internet, and not just consume its content. Maybe you don’t believe that people would do that for fun.. but just check out what people listen to for fun from the Teaching Company..
‘Ali ibn Abu Bakr al-Harawi turns out to be a very well traveled individual. He died in 1215 A.D., leaving behind a book that lists sights to be seen in cities from North Africa to Iran. This book has been translated under the title A Lonely Wayfarers Guide to Pilgrimage (book here). Readers beware: it has none of the charm of the book by his contemporary Ibn Jubayr, who gives personal glimpses of life on the road. What al-Harawi does have is a certain encyclopedism of reference. He is going to name that tiny town and tell you about one or two things you might see there. The following is a typical entry:
Imtan is a village that contains a mosque where tradition maintains Moses son of Amran dwelled in that location. The impression of his staff is in the rock. God knows best.
This village is located in what is today southern Syria. It’s not on the itinerary of Ibn Jubayr. There doesn’t seem to be a lot to say about it, but al-Harawi located one thing: the biblical Moses supposedly once dwelt here and an impression of his staff remains. Al-Harawi marks his doubt about the truth of this with the standard “God knows best.”
Much of al-Harawi’s book reads just like this. Villages and cities are mentioned, and prominent burials are listed. For a tiny village there may be only one thing to mention. For a larger city like Damascus or Cairo the list goes on for a couple of pages. The important thing to note about each place is who was buried here. This ties in to the aims of medieval Muslim pilgrims, who were on the lookout for baraka, as Josef Meri (translator of this book by al-Harawi) details in The Cult of Saints Among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (book here). We can speak of an economy of shrines with varying levels of reverence attached to them, and this book by al-Harawi is thus a catalog of places—even out of the way places—where a pilgrim could stop.
It might be useful to compare this medieval economy to our own contemporary economy of places. Every town wants to “get on the map” and they do so by trumpeting some oddball accomplishment or point of notoriety. In a country connected by highways with thousands of cars zooming past, every town chamber of commerce tries to think of ways to get people to brake.. or invents a festival to attract people. Anyone who’s driven through the vastness of the United States will recognize signs such as this:
by Flickr user CCCPxokkeu, used under Creative Commons License
It’s in this light that one should understand the insistence of medieval travel handbooks on highlighting burials or other relics of past saints. There is no “secular” tourism.. but there are lots of people moving around in this landscape, either on hajj or other lesser pilgrimages. Towns and villages in this cultural zone made a pitch to “get on the map” for these pilgrims. I would add that in my judgment this is a system that lends more dignity to the landscape than our American local boasts (see lists of odd capitals and other strange sites at RoadsideAmerica.com.
When imagining medieval Cairo it’s necessary to get one’s mind around this emphasis on tombs. For both al-Harawi and Ibn Jubayr, entrance of Cairo brings on a long list of famous burials in the Qarafa or southern cemetery. The importance of these tombs in setting the character of the city can be glimpsed in the Fatimid (Shi’a) emphasis of certain tombs connected to the women from the Household of the Prophet, and then the counter emphasis on the shrine of the Imam al-Shafi’a by the Sunni Ayyubid dynasty. The important tombs said something concrete about the city, and were a political/religious statement. A visitor to Cairo would not have a list of sites such as Disneyland and the Hollywood walk of stars in mind, but important religious shrines. The only competitor to these burials were structures that could be classified as “wonders”.. such as the pyramids. These were in a separate category, although worthy of visit.
My sense is that when we read about medieval cities we don’t imagine the cityscape as contemporaries would have experienced it. We think in terms of “tourist” sites, when there was no such thing. Our eyes glaze over when we see a list of burials for a town.. but that list is telling us something important.
image from Book of the Dead
Spell 30b connected to the weighing of the heart scene contains a three part ethical pronouncement: “He did not diminish the offerings in the temples, he did not destroy what had been made, he did not go about with deceitful speech…” That’s almost a livable ethic: honor the gods, don’t mess up what’s ordered, and tell the truth. I can’t think of much that wouldn’t be covered there (in the way of sins). It could all be simplified in the age of Google to “don’t be evil”.. but we like a little more meat than that on our ethical ideals.
In another place in the Book of the Dead this ethical ideal is expanded considerably. This expansion comes in spell 125, referred to as the “negative confession” because of the form of its 42 ethical statements. These 42 statements are presented in a tabular form, as can be seen in the image above. The relationship of these 42 statements to the events at the weighing of the heart is evident from the small scenes on the far right of this list, where elements of that scene are evoked. In each statement the deceased addresses a god and then says “I have not done such and such.” I don’t see any difference between these negative statements and standard commandments (“thou shalt not..”). The Book of the Dead is immersed in the drama of the dead and their movement through the afterlife. In that drama what would be commands to the living can only be presented as professions of innocence by the deceased. So no need to get hung with presentation of the ethical statements.
The natural comparison for us is to the ten commandments. Where does this list of 42 ethical statements overlap or differ from those basic ten? The overlaps are pretty obvious.. sometimes they’re covered from multiple angles. “I have not fornicated with a fornicator” is joined by “I have not had intercourse with a married woman” and “I have not wrongly copulated.” Presumably this would be covered in the ten commandments by the single “You shall not commit adultery.” Stealing, killing, lying, and coveting can all be found, from various angles, in the 42 statements.
Another place of overlap between the 42 statements and the ten commandments is in the responsibility directed toward the gods or God. The ancient Israelites were not to misuse the name of God and were to remember the sabbath. The deceased in the Book of the Dead proclaims: “I have not cursed a god” and “I have not harmed the bread-ration of the gods.” These statements can be construed as similar in intent: the gods are to be given their rightful honor.
One place where the ancient Egyptian statements go beyond the ten commandments is in their willingness to condemn what we might consider personality traits: “I was not sullen” and “I have not been impatient.” We tend to think of these as traits which might be annoying, but are hardly a “sin.” But anyone who wades far into Egyptian wisdom literature will see that these personality traits are considered acts.. and thus they can be considered sins.
I see two places where the ten commandments do not overlap with ancient Egypt. First, and most obviously, is the command to have no other gods and not to make idols. That’s the great commandment against polytheism, and there can be nothing parallel in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. A second more surprising place is the commandment to honor father and mother. The Book of the Dead doesn’t go there, although the deceased states: “I have not disputed the King.” That’s a telling difference. Religion among the Israelites (especially as it developed during the exile) was family based. The religious culture of ancient Egypt was centered on the King, one vessel by which the divine was made present in the world. Looking to Egyptian wisdom literature, it’s clear that respect for elders was valued.. but the Book of the Dead seems to incorporate the entire authority structure with reference to the King alone.
